—Who?
—It does not matter. Any of them. The SS will call the wrong person, and they will arrest us, or they will round us up and shoot us all. We will never make it all the way to Bleicherode with these orders.
I’m tempted to disagree on principle, but the man does have a point. He also works for the SS. He might know a bit more about them than I do. Problem is I don’t have another plan, so I sort of need this one to work. How do we make sure the SS will let us through? We have good orders, ones we want to follow. We just need to make sure these orders supersede every other set of orders on that table. Problem solved…. I have absolutely no idea how we’re supposed to do that…. Maybe he does.
—Sir? Is there anyone the SS wouldn’t stop, anything they wouldn’t check on?
—… It would have to be something above their clearance, some top-secret project they are not allowed to know about.
So what we need is some sort of school note, from Hitler. Sure. Why not?
—Could we… forge some documents?
Von Braun is soooo not going to like this.
—There is the letterhead…
What letterhead? Oh, I forgot about their weird manners. I’m probably supposed to ask.
—What letterhead?
—We received these from the printer last month. I was about to destroy them.
He’s fetching a cardboard box from behind his desk. Looks like… paper. One big pile of Nazi paper, eagle, swastika, and all, and the initials “VzBV” across the top. I don’t know what it means. BzBV, with a B, is the department Kammler runs, what von Braun actually works for. This… I’ve never heard of it.
—What’s VzBV?
—It’s nothing. It’s a typo.
—It doesn’t exist?
—No. Just a misprint.
Let me get this straight. We need to forge some documents from a secret project and he just happens to have a boxful of letterhead from a place that’s not real, in his office, right now. This all seems a little too convenient, but I’ll take it.
—Well… There’s your project. VzBV.
—What does it stand for?
—I don’t know. It’s your project.
—Vorhaben zur besonderen Verwendung?
Project for Special Disposition. I like it.
—I think it’s perfect. It sounds important but it’s vague enough it could mean anything. How long do you need to get your people ready?
—A few days.
Days! How long does it take to throw some clothes into a bag?
—That seems like a long time, sir. The Russians will be here in a few days.
—All my research. The Americans will want it.
—I understand, sir. You have some boxes to pack. That should take a few hours, not a few days.
—There are nearly five thousand of us. It will take time.
I don’t know what he’s talking about. We can’t all leave. There are—He just said it. There are nearly five thousand of them!
—What? No, sir. I’m supposed to get you out, you and your top scientists. You are… how can I put this?… (Off your rocker. Nutty as a fruitcake. Cuckoo bananas.)… underestimating the risks involved. Those fake papers might be enough for them to let a car through, not a town. A few people, sir. That’s the mission.
—Then you need to rethink the mission, Lili. The Russians will exterminate anyone we leave behind if the German army does not do it for them. There are families here. We have to take them with us. Those that want to come, at least. I will not leave without them.
He is insane. Even if half of his staff stays behind, there’s no way we can move thousands of people without being stopped everywhere. He also sounded genuinely sincere right then. He even dropped the radio-host voice for it. I realize I have no idea who that man is. Thousands of people died here building his rockets, and he let it happen. Mother says he only cares about science. I thought that made him a coward, but he’ll apparently risk his life in the thick of war to save the people he works with.
What does that make him? Did he believe them when they told him who was human and who wasn’t? Or did he just… wish all the horrors away, pretend they didn’t exist? Did he sleep through the rubble and watch yellow fields through the window? Like most things, it’s probably more complicated than this or that. I wanted to save a good man, or kill an evil one. Von Braun might be neither. The world is flooding with egotistical men concerned only with their needs and wants. Another place and time, he might just be… unremarkable in his own self-serving way. Von Braun is no hero, that’s a fact, but this is the first remotely selfless thing to come out of his mouth. If I’m going to do this, I need to believe there is something inside that man worth saving, something other than knowledge.
I must be as crazy as he is. We’ll need boxes, lots of boxes. We can’t fit all these people in cars or trucks. We’ll have to put them on trains. This won’t be subtle. We’re moving a town. I’ll start making stencils while they pack. I want those four letters painted bright on everything. Red and white, something you can’t miss. I want the boxes painted. I want jackets painted, armbands. I want the toilet paper to say VzBV. I want them to see it, everywhere. That department didn’t exist yesterday. By tomorrow, it will have trains and a few thousand employees. This can work, right?
What the hell am I thinking? We have zero chance. We’re all going to die and we’re going to do it the stupid way.
4
I Wonder
I sent my daughter to Germany. I wish I knew what kind of mother that makes me.
It all began about six months ago. German major general Walter Dornberger contacted someone at the General Electric Company through their embassy in Portugal. The note was short. “I wish to come to some arrangement,” German for “I know we are losing the war and I am willing to help you if you can guarantee my safety.” The US government liked Dornberger because of his rank and what he might know about Hitler’s strategy. I liked him because he built rockets. He recruited Wernher von Braun in 1932—the two of them went to school together—before he was given military command of Peenemünde. When the V-2 first launched successfully, Dornberger said: “This is the first of a new era in transportation, that of space travel.” I wanted him. After the assassination attempt on Hitler, the SS were put in charge of everything. Kammler took over Peenemünde and Dornberger was pushed aside, sent away to command training batteries. The OSS arranged for him to meet the Ninth Army in the north.
Dornberger can help us reach the stars, but he cannot do it alone. Wernher von Braun is the brains behind the V-2. Unfortunately for him, and me, von Braun does not have the rank to escape on his own. I convinced the OSS they had to send someone. It took some effort. Those men did not have the required intellect. They did not realize it was the Soviets they were racing against, not the Germans, that the prize was more than a piece of land in Europe. A friend at Caltech had performed an analysis of German rocket capabilities for the army, but they missed the point in its entirety. I showed them what could have been, had the Germans been given enough time. Bombs dropping from space with absolute precision. Wars waged halfway across the globe without ever leaving home. Acquiring the V-2 became a top priority, but they wanted the hardware, not the brains that created it. They would improve upon it themselves. Only they could not, and they would waste a decade figuring that out. The Germans were better at this. We had made them that way, Mother and I. I did not dare attack their unshakable belief in American exceptionalism, but I hinted at what Russia could do if they captured Germany’s best and brightest. I did it over dimly lit dinners, so men could claim the idea for themselves the next day. It worked with painful predictability. They can live with failure, so long as no one else succeeds. Operation Paperclip was born within days.